Smartphones on Wheels in Southeast Asia: A Crossroads for Data Governance

While the transformation of automobiles into data-generating “smartphones on wheels” has revolutionized mobility, it has also raised critical concerns over data privacy and sovereignty. Equipped with sensors and connected technologies, smart vehicles collect vast amounts of data, including personal information, driving patterns, and biometric identifiers. While auto-exporting jurisdictions such as the United States, the European Union, and China have introduced regulatory measures to address these challenges, countries importing smart vehicles remain vulnerable due to their limited influence over the auto companies’ integrated technology and data policies. This Article examines the regulatory and economic challenges faced by developing nations integrating foreign-designed smart vehicles, with a focus on Southeast Asia’s rapid adoption of Chinese electric vehicles. Using Thailand as a case study, it highlights the urgent need for regulatory frameworks that balance data protection with economic growth. By analyzing approaches from the three dominant auto-exporting jurisdictions, this Article explores how regional cooperation and adaptive regulatory strategies can help developing nations assert greater control over smart vehicle data governance

All the President\u27s Men: Congressional Appointment Restrictions at the Founding

The appointment power is exercised through a unique unicameral process. The Founders emphasized its distinctiveness from our system’s general bicameral legislative process, yet the power has largely been overlooked by scholars and jurists. This Note reveals that appointment discretion is the crucial, but understudied, flipside of the removal-power coin and is essential for presidential administration. Constitutional text, structure, and history indicate that there is a line beyond which congressional restrictions on who is eligible to hold federal office exceed Congress’s delegated powers and infringe on the president’s nomination and appointment power under Article II. The conventional wisdom on this line, expressed in Myers v. United States, is incorrect and permits undue congressional interference into presidential powers. This Note employs a case study of the Fairness in Judicial Appointments Act to explore the historical meaning of the Constitution as it relates to statutory restrictions on eligibility for appointed offices. Ultimately, by rebuffing absolutist trends in recent scholarship, we show that while some legislative qualifications are permissible, many existing statutes purporting to restrict whom the president may appoint to federal office are invalid and unconstitutional

Physicists as Environmental Experts

The question of which scientists are qualified to provide expert guidance in legal controversies is a perennial debate among scholars, judges, and lawyers. Scientists who participate in legal disputes can achieve enormous power and influence, not only over the case at hand but over long-term developments in legal doctrine. While these issues arise in many areas of the law, environmental litigation has been a particularly active site of contestations over epistemic authority. Courts have frequently relied on scientists to understand whether the government is justified in regulating pollution and who may be liable for environmental and public health harms. This Article provides a historical account of how industry-funded physicists sought to limit the types of environmental knowledge that courts deemed reliable. As federal regulations increased during the 1970s, the business community recruited physicists to represent their interests in legal disputes over pollution control. Harvard professor Richard Wilson was the most prominent physicist to engage in this work for the petroleum and chemical industries, and the Article focuses on his role in shaping the way the Supreme Court evaluated environmental and public health studies. Wilson pioneered a method of understanding threats from toxic chemicals called probabilistic, quantitative risk assessment, which industries hoped would limit pollution regulation. He went on to join forces with prominent conservative organizations like the Atlantic Legal Foundation to assist companies in limiting their liability from toxic chemical exposures. Even though Wilson had no training or expertise in environmental health research, the Supreme Court largely adopted his approach to understanding pollution risks and scientific expertise in several enormously important cases for environmental law, including Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, and General Electric Co. v. Joiner

Perttu v. Richards: Brief of Law Professors as \u3cem\u3eAmici Curiae\u3c/em\u3e in Support of Respondent

Amici are professors of law who have studied, taught, and written about prisoner litigation and about rights to jury trials. They submit this brief to share their views, based on that experience, on the proper interpretation of the Prison Litigation Reform Act) in light of the important jury trial rights at stake and the practical realities of prisoner litigation

Competitive Effects of T-Mobile/Sprint: Analysis of a 4-to-3 Merger

Mergers in the mobile telecommunications industry are of keen interest to policymakers and scholars. This sector often experiences high concentration levels, driven by pronounced economies of scale and scope, alongside substantial regulatory barriers to entry created by radio spectrum allocations. Hence, antitrust authorities frequently struggle with the tradeoff between the benefits of enhanced synergies and the potentially adverse effects of increased market power. This tension results in varied outcomes from regulatory agencies when approving (or blocking) mergers. Between 2012 and 2016, for instance, four E.U. nations (Austria, Ireland, Germany, and Italy) allowed the consummation of “4-to-3” mobile telecommunications transactions, while the U.K. and Denmark blocked similar combinations. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rejected “4-to-3” mergers in 2011 and 2014, yet approved the T-Mobile acquisition of Sprint in April 2020—a decision that continues to spur debate. This Article examines the T-Mobile/Sprint post-merger evidence of retail mobile subscription prices, network investment, service quality, market share, and industry profits in the U.S. mobile communications industry. Our findings suggest that the T-Mobile/Sprint merger has led to consumer benefits, challenging arguments claiming negative impacts due to the carriers’ consolidation

\u3cem\u3eYounger\u3c/em\u3e and Older Abstention

When victims of systemic rights violations in state criminal proceedings seek federal court relief, governmental defendants often ask federal courts to abstain for reasons of federalism. These arguments frequently disregard the Supreme Court’s emphasis that abstention is a narrow exception to federal courts’ duty to exercise jurisdiction. Lower federal courts are increasingly employing a form of “free-floating federalism,” diverging from the Supreme Court’s careful balance between comity and individual rights. This has led to lower courts’ significant expansion of criminal abstention doctrine, leaving severe irreparable harm unaddressed in an increasingly broad range of settings, such as pretrial detention and child welfare proceedings. Given the federal judiciary’s increased emphasis on tradition in interpreting contemporary equitable remedies, this Article contrasts these novel expansions with historical equitable practices. While the doctrine of criminal abstention is now known as “Younger abstention” after the 1971 case Younger v. Harris, criminal abstention and its core exceptions originate from centuries-old equitable proceedings in both the United States and England. Historically, courts of equity intervened in ongoing criminal proceedings when those proceedings were inadequate to redress harm or irreparable harm would otherwise result. Similarly, in the decades after the Fourteenth Amendment, federal courts balanced federal constitutional rights against state interests in ways that accounted for a federal judicial role in ending great irreparable harm. The most recent lower court expansions of the doctrine are in severe tension with that tradition

Spending Clause Standing

The Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act allotted almost $220 billion to state, local, and tribal governments to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. This money, the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund, gave recipients wide spending discretion to address their struggling economies. But the legislation had one key limitation: Recipients could not use the money to “directly or indirectly” cut their taxes. If a recipient violated this “Offset Provision,” the Department of the Treasury might recoup the funds. Nearly two-dozen states alleged that the Offset Provision was unduly coercive and ambiguous, violating the Spending Clause. However, with no threatened recoupment looming, it was unclear whether the states had standing to sue at all. The five circuit courts that heard these cases did not reach consensus on the standing issue. Numerous opinions across six cases offered differing conceptions of “sovereign” injuries and applied Massachusetts v. EPA’s command for “special solicitude” to the state plaintiffs inconsistently. The Offset Provision cases provide the first opportunity to study the intersection of the Spending Clause and state standing. With no precedent on when states can challenge congressional spending legislation, the cases navigated standing’s incoherent doctrine to craft new rules. The Offset Provision cases offer two novel categories of sovereign injuries-in-fact that states allegedly suffer in Spending Clause cases: the “Spending Contract” and “Tax Power” injuries. The former relates to an unconstitutionally ambiguous or coercive federal offer, while the latter describes an impermissible regulatory subject matter. The Offset Provision cases define the terms of federalism’s future battleground. The Spending Contract and Tax Power injuries provide enterprising state attorneys general with the weapons to dismantle disfavored federal policy. Instead of adhering to standing doctrine’s core separation-of-powers principles, a majority of the involved circuit courts have enabled states to readily air their policy grievances in federal court. Because Congress increasingly relies on its spending power to pass legislation, when states can and cannot challenge federal policy has enormous implications for modern policymaking. When appropriate, Spending Clause standing doctrine should permit heightened scrutiny when a state unilaterally attempts to block a federal program

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Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Davis: Brief of Civil Procedure and Complex Litigation Law Professors as \u3cem\u3eAmici Curiae\u3c/em\u3e in Support of Respondents

Amici are law professors with expertise in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, including the requirements for class certification under Rule 23(b)(3). Together, we share an interest in ensuring that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are construed “to secure the just, speedy and inexpensive determination of every action and proceeding.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 1